The global population has increased steadily over the last several centuries—since the times of the industrial revolution. Advances in both agriculture and medicine have enabled both improved fertility and decreased mortality, allowing for rapid population growth around the globe. Technological advances in food production have enabled the growth in population capacity of the world in one key way: by improving the efficiency with which food crops can be grown and harvested—not by expanding the overall size of the land devoted to agriculture. Increasingly, world populations are migrating out of rural, inland areas with easy access to agricultural food sources, into densely populated, urban, coastal areas. Today, more than 40% of the world's population lives within 100 km of a coast, and over half of the world's population lives in a city. Improvements in agricultural output are important to sustaining this population growth, but as people are increasingly detached from agricultural food sources, additional food sources must be sought and exploited.
The primary source of protein for a large percentage of the world's population comes not from onshore agriculture, but from fisheries. Particularly, the increasing urban, coastal communities of the developing world depend heavily on fish as a primary food staple. Wild-caught fish provide, according to some estimates, 20% of the world's protein intake—which will only increase as global populations continue to migrate towards the coasts. In contrast to the innovations seen in agriculture, the efficiency of catching wild-caught seafood has not improved significantly in generations, due in large part to relying on outdated, low-tech methods for location of the fish themselves. The bulk of innovation in the fishing industry has been in improving the effectiveness of catching or processing the fish—both of which have provided incremental improvement to yields. Ultimately, though, these improvements have not increased efficiency enough to offset the rising costs of the inputs to catching the fish (fuel, labor), and global prices have climbed steadily. Currently, fishing fleets use historical models to navigate to a position where fish are likely to congregate, but ultimately a good portion of the ‘last mile’ of catching fish is left to chance. This ‘last mile’ is where there is most opportunity for technological advancement.
The growing urban, coastal population of the world will need access to quality, low-cost seafood in the near and long-term. A means of improving the efficiency with which fish are located is needed to enable large increases in the output of the world's fisheries, thereby lowering the cost of seafood products, and fulfilling growing global demand. For this reason, operators of fishing vessels can use an unmanned aerial vehicle (“UAV,” also called a “drone”) to aid in the detection, identification, tracking, and ultimately catching of fish in an marine environment. The subject matter of the present disclosure is directed to overcoming, or at least reducing the effects of, the difficulty inherent in locating fish in the marine environment.